Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Saddam’s fixation with torture was passed on to his sons when they were still in their preteens. Uday and Qusay were both taken on weekly visits to witness torture and executions in Baghdad prisons.

Yet despite the carapace of evil that surrounded him, Saddam had also been known to weep openly after having condemned a friend, a relative, even his two sons-in-law to death. During the 1979 purge of the Baath Party that gave him power, he stood at the lectern and wept openly as he condemned party members. As each man was taken to his death, the conference hall echoed with his amplified sobbing, picked up by the microphones on the podium. It was a macabre piece of theater.

All these personality traits, and more, had been studied by Mossad before a plan of how to assassinate Saddam Hussein was prepared.

Once more the operation revolved around Saddam’s insatiable sexual appetite. A Mossad katsa in Baghdad had learned that a new mistress—the wife of a general Saddam had recently had executed for disobeying an order—had been installed in a villa on the bank of the Euphrates River. Saddam had taken to swimming in the river with his bodyguards before visiting her.

The plan was based on one that the CIA had once used to try to kill Fidel Castro. On that occasion, seashells were rigged with explosives and deposited on the seabed off Cuba, the spot was one where Castro liked to go diving. That operation failed because the CIA had not taken into account that strong sea currents would carry the shells out of the area.

The river would present no such problem. The explosives were designed to be detonated by Saddam and his bodyguards surging through the water.

With days to go before the plan was to be implemented, the Baghdad katsa sent a coded short-burst transmission to Tel Aviv that the mistress had committed suicide.

Two days later, the second Iraqi war started. Mossad agents in Iraq’s western desert, Baghdad, and Basra provided important intelligence that enabled U.S. and British aircraft to launch devastating air attacks. Thousands of Iraqis were killed or injured.

In the run-up to hostilities, Dagan had experienced a familiar pressure. Tenet had started to call several times a day to inquire whether Mossad was able to confirm that Iraq possessed WMD.

Dagan had replied the way he always did: Not yet, but we are still looking. Indeed, the search had become a priority for his deep-cover katsas in Iraq. They had worked independently of the United Nations weapons inspectors, who had had a similar lack of success—much to the barely concealed disappointment of President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair. The UN Security Council had become a forum for their frustration. Both leaders were now committed to the claim that they had to go to war to protect the world against WMD.

But in Tel Aviv, Mossad analysts told Dagan that no matter how the CIA and Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee ( JIC) presented the evidence, there was no “smoking gun” proof that Saddam did have WMD. Nevertheless, Ariel Sharon, committed to Washington’s claims, mobilized Israel’s civilian population: gas masks were widely distributed; a warning of an impending chemical or biological attack was repeated over the radio. The precautions were widely reported in the United States and Britain, creating a mood that WMD were about to be launched. Propaganda fed fear, fear created more propaganda.

There was talk of a preemptive WMD strike against Israel; or Cyprus, where Britain had a sizable force; or the Persian Gulf, where the U.S. Navy had gathered in strength; or Kuwait, the launch point for the assault on Iraq. With every rumor the fear increased.

But nothing happened. Not a single rocket containing so much as one spore of a nerve agent or a drop of chemical poison was launched. In the history of warfare, there had never been such an anticlimax.

Twenty days after the war started the fighting was over. But another war, in many ways more deadly, had begun. Inside Iraq, a potent mixture of religious hatred, oil, and greed had started to ignite. In the south of the country, the Shias of the marsh Arabs began to lay their claim to be a powerful voice in planning Iraq’s future. They had suffered much. Their demands, uttered from the minarets of their mosques, were reinforced by the mullahs of Tehran. They traveled to the Iraqi holy city of Najaf. The first of many confrontations with American forces took place. There was more bloodshed.

In the north of Iraq, the Kurds prepared to grab their moment of independence. That brought them ever closer to conflict with Turkey, which saw an independent Kurdish nation as unacceptable. In central Iraq, the other tribes wanted their views taken into account in the formation of a new Iraq. Saddam’s once all-powerful Baath Party could not be ignored. Just as in postwar Germany it had turned out to be impossible to eradicate the Nazi Party completely from the country’s bureaucracy, so it turned out to be with Baathism. The party was embedded into the very structure of what Iraq had been, was, and could become. It ran the police, the civil service, the utilities. To sack and arrest every party member was impossible; they were the only hope to get Iraq moving again.

Inevitably, Iraq had descended into lawlessness, which by May 2003 had turned out to be even more frightening than even Saddam’s reign of terror.

Meantime, the search for the tyrant had become a manhunt once more led by Mossad. Its analysts had created a scenario that owed something to Saddam’s own liking for theatrical gesture.

The analysts suggested that Saddam had washed out the expensive black dye from his hair and shaved off his mustache, and was dressed as a peasant. His most likely way out of Baghdad had been through the vast, forbidding, empty spaces of Iraq’s eastern desert, this was the ancient contraband route from Afghanistan that first the silk traders and then the drug dealers had used.

In those first postwar weeks, the route had become the favorite one for Iraqis who feared for their lives now that the regime had fallen.

Was Saddam really among them? No one knew. But the feeling grew that he was heading for the mountains of northern Iran. There were suggestions—never supported by real evidence—that from there he would disappear into the hands of two powerful friends he had counted on before, Russia and China. While both officially denied they would grant Saddam sanctuary, Moscow’s and Beijing’s records of support for Saddam were long. To have Saddam now in their hands would certainly ensure that he would never reveal all the details of the secret deals he had made with both.

To discover his whereabouts, Mossad agents were supported by American spy satellites. Their multicameras produced thousands of close-up images and scooped up even more separate conversations every minute from refugees across the sands. But there was still the old problem of analyzing and interpreting the data. The American intelligence community was still pitifully short of translators. But the hunt went on.

Then, in May 2003, Meir Dagan switched many of the katsas trying to track Saddam onto a more important threat for Israel. Despite the vigilance of Shin Bet, two British-born radical bombers had launched a suicide attack on a Tel Aviv club; three were killed and fifty injured. The explosive they used had overcome the most stringent of airport and airline security checks. It was more lethal than Semtex; it could be smuggled undetected from one country to another, from one terrorist cell to another. For the eighty terror groups listed on Mossad’s computers, the weapon had once more tipped the scales in favor of the terrorists.

After a week of intensive investigation by chemists in Israel’s center for weapons research in a suburb of Tel Aviv, its lethal qualities and country of origin had been discovered. The revelation sent a collective shock wave through the global intelligence community. The Israeli experts concluded that the explosive had been manufactured in the weapons research laboratories of ZDF, one of China’s leading military defense contractors.